cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work
Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of our other sponsors,
including Wisconsin Public Television,
the Division of Continuing
Wisconsin Alumni Association, thanks for coming to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I get to have the
distinct pleasure of getting
to you, Joe Kapler to introduce two people
They're both from the Wisconsin Historical Society.
They are going to be talking to us about their exhibit called
Wisconsin Innovations. Joe
life at the Wisconsin is Historical Society.stic
He received a BA in history from
a master's in American History Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa,
master's in Museum Studies from frEastern Illinois University. a
Joe began as an intern in Minnesota, in Missouri, and in
Iowa before spending three
of Grand Rapids in Michigan. He then joined the staff of the
Wisconsin Historical Society
Division of Museums in 2and Historic Sites.r the
He has curated five major exhibitions and numerous
smaller displays. His other major responsibilities
include developing museum collections, assisting
researchers and producing articles and online content.
Dave Driscoll is curator of business and technology at the
Historical Society. He
Civilization from Brown University, I'm glad to hear
that we have one to study, and
technology and museum studies from the University of Delaware
where he was a Hagley Fellow. He worked as a curator at the
Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and
at the Detroit Historical Museum
Historical Museum staff in 1992. before joining the Wisconsin
covered such diverse topics as His projects at the museum have
mail order shopping, I guess mail order shipping, excuse me,
labor in Milwaukee, peaceful they both go together, organized
advertising posters, uses of the atom, farm implement
I think Dave will speak second, Joe will speak first.
Please join me in welcoming the two of them to Wednesday Nite
at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Joe Kapler: Thanks, Tom. Thank you.
Good evening. I am Joe Kapler.
On behalf of Dave and myself, I'd like to say thank you to the
Wisconsin Alumni Association for
the Lab. It's nice inviting us to Wednesday Nite at
building sometimes. When to get out of the
work where there's no windows yand often in basements.u
So even on a cold, crisp night
pleased to be here. We're itgoing to talk a little bitre
tonight, for the whole show here, about the exhibit
Wisconsin Innovations: From the Iconic to the Unexpected.
We both worked on that project. It opened last September and
will be up at least through August of 2012.
I will introduce the subject, the project, our roles in it as
well, and then turn things over to Dave who was the primary
curator in the whole research and writing and presentation of
the exhibition. And we'll have time for some
question and answer following about an hour presentation or
so. So just a little bit of brief
introduction. Where we
we often work in basements. This building here on the left
is the Wisconsin Historical Society's headquarters building.
And you're probably more
terms of our organization's identity of world class Northn
American history library and
like the museum collections that archives, But it also has things
preservation offices, aadministrative offices, Office
of School Services, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre
Research. So a lot
building. I see a few familiar faces here
from, I believe, work with us and sometimes volunteer with us
at the Historical Society. And
is our museum building. tThat is where we do public
exhibitions and programs. And that is, of course, up on
Capitol Square. And then
here on the left hand corner, our mission statement in a
nutshell: collecting, preserving, and sharing stories
since 1846. This is the museum's
neighborhood. A little
seen before. And, of building you may have
We're right on Capitol Square, course, the Capitol.
appropriate as we charged with and that's symbolically
history of all peoples who have donce claimed Wisconsin home ore
still do or currently do
It's also practically a good or may in the future.
partnership with them we neighbor to have because in
fourth-grade Wisconsin students when they come to here to get
their dose of Wisconsin history.
constituency for our That's a very important core
The Capitol and the Square, of course, draw hundreds of
thousands of diverse
And some of those people come through our door, and they may
be local Madisonians, Wisconsin residents, people in town for
the state basketball tournament,
out of state guests to show them a little bit of Madison
or Wisconsin, international visitors.
So that's great and that's a
it presents really kind of a wonderful opportunity, but also
connect with each and every visitor that comes in there, our
visitorship is very, very broad.
as a way to introduce. This is our exhibition logo here
innovations from the And you see Wisconsin
And that's the tag line, but iconic to the unexpected.
sum up the contents of the that really also really helps
inventions and ideas that originated in one way or another
in Wisconsin. We'll look
the content, chose what to at how we researched
how we wrangled this complex and include or not to include, and
presentation. Not a unwibook or something likeery
that, a gallery presentation. And then at the end, we'll offer
some tentative conclusions about
Wisconsin. Lastly, the culture of innovation in
exhibit here, Wisconsin Innovations, is one of our what
we call major temporary exhibits.
It's up for at least a year, and
which we do events and programs and special events or special
tours, even product merchandise in the museum store and also
including this event
This is another way for us to share with maybe a different
audience, a different and higher
we're finding would possibly not level of interpretation that
exhibit. This is also be sucwhat we call in thegallery
museum field outreach. So this is what we consider a
real great supplemental thing that we do stemming from a major
exhibition on our fourth
So how are the floor Radell Gallery.
So what you'll kind of get in this presentation is essentially
a behind the scenes look at the development process at the
museum for doing exhibitions. And in another nutshell, we tell
stories through the display and interpretation of artifacts and
images and other original content in a museum.
So you'll see the opportunities and challenges that that
presents in a subject like
The origins of this project. Wisconsin Innovations.
poster here? You see Are you familiar with this
This is a poster put together by it for sale around.
Wisconsin first, is what our Office of School Services.
And it's kind of a bullet point listing of some interesting
firsts in Wisconsin. So that is the inspiration for
this exhibition. We're
about how we use this poster and going to talk tonight
develop this exhibit, and then supplemental research, how to
some time here, we're going weto squeeze in as many of thee
interesting stories and compelling stories about some of
these certain innovations.
very good starting point, and Thit enumerates many things. a
However, upon research, and that was mostly done by Dave
Driscoll, certainly a good
list, but perhaps not staracademically rigorous.ive
That is a job of a museum exhibition is to flesh out some
things at a higher level and at a greater level, and that's what
Dave spent a good year and a
produced a very good show. So hI'm going to turn over the
podium now to David who's going to work through much of the
content. I'll probably
little bit. >> David spell him in a
We're going to be trading off a couple of times as we go
through. Joe worked more heavily on some
certain areas than others, and
those particular topics. This Iis a screen capture of thiso
same information from the Wisconsin Firsts poster.
And it's pretty straightforward and direct.
The JI Case Company of Racine produced the first gas-powered
tractor. It's a simple, clear, direct
statement. Well,
In 1892, or possibly 1894, we don't really know, an inventor
from California came to Racine
the JI Case Company. This to bmachine ran but not wellfor
enough to be produced. Case decided to abandon the
project because they were doing an excellent business
building steam traction engines.
manufacturer of traction engines They were the leading
didn't see a need to fool around in the country, and I guess they
Twenty years later, they with this kind of new idea.
marketplace. Peak wereproduction of steam the
traction engines happened in
company had lost two-thirds 1of its business to smaller,he
cheaper, lighter, more
So in desperation, the company powerful gasoline tractors.
tractor design, rushed it into production, and then for
marketing purposes claimed the
to develop gasoline tractors. So pedigree of being the first one
that simple statement is maybe what I concluded from this is
isn't true in a really literally true, but it certainly
And as frustrating as this kind of information was, and there
was a lot of it, these kind of questions and distinctions
raised by a lot of the poster innovations actually became
important in formulating our
back and go through initthat outline shortly. get
Initial task was research, of course, finding out what was, in
fact, invented in Wisconsin. We cobbled together a list from
various sources, starting with
Wisconsin Alumni Research thFoundation website, varioushe
articles, top 10 lists, things
conversations with friends and we knew somehow already,
together in sort of acquworksheets like this. them
And we tried to track the inventor, the date, the place,
and what the invention, the significance was.
When these lists got too
sublists grouped by topic, unwieldy, we broke them into
scientific, so on. And architectural, political,
actually a pretty difficult project to do.
Museums use authentic artifacts to communicate historical
information. As Joe mentioned, we tell
stories using objects,
And what many of these invention images and words.
they were not represented storiin our collections.s that
And this was a crucial issue. The first question we always
asked is, do we have the
them? Many of the objectsobjects were quitewe get
scarce. And there's a number of
different reasons why the objects may not have been in our
collections. First and
may never have cared about foremost is the museum
It's interesting that in the topic previously.
like in politics and other generations of museums, kind of
most meaningful at certain times cultures, certain issues become
So if you look at museum and then sort of fade away.
very distinct collecting eras. collections, you can discern
a way that we addressed this And this apparently was just not
Another standard explanation kind of material previously.
fire, theft, and so on. And mia final reason, which It,
think applies particularly
originators failed to consider to this topic, is that the
might be of historical that the work they were doing
They were really engaged in solving a particular problem,
not self-consciously preserving how they solved that problem.
Joe mentioned also that we spent
to track down these objects. the better part of a year trying
commit to a project, put it on It can be a little scary to
it, when you don't know if the schedule, start advertising
to fill the gallery. That's youkind of the limb we wentuff
out on for this project. But
compelling enough topic and wethere was a large enougha
selection of things that we could probably at least get a
gallery's worth. So I'll
a little bit later. In fact, come back to that topic
we kind of triangulated back and the way it worked was
objects we could forth through a good story,
We were constantly asking ourselves what do we want?
What can we find? Is what we can find important or
interesting? Does it
So there was not a clean, efficient way to sort through
all that. We just kind
as we went. And we'll talk a little bit more
about some of the collecting shortly.
And one of the things which maybe wasn't a plan initially
but turned out, I think, to be a
was we borrowed a bunch of stuff good side effect of the project
relationships with many whihistorical societies andsh
institutions
And I'm hoping that we can build throughout the state.
and I'm not sure how this would onwork, but share some of ourps,
resources to help those other institutions out as well.
And that's kind of an ongoing issue that we're working
on off and on. In the final exhibition, about
half of what's on display there we wound up borrowing from other
institutions. The criteria
final selection was covered pretty much by the list here.
Overall, we wanted to have
We wanted people for come in a diverse experience.
background or interest was, find something interesting and
engaging in the gallery. And
in a couple of different ways. we sort of broke that down
include some familiar items. The first was we wanted to
part of the subtitle is. We Thwanted to take advantage ofnic
people's personal experiences,
familiar with so they kind of felt at home and maybe learned
something new about it but also kind of felt comfortable with
the material. At the
throw in a certain number of same time, we wanted to
ustories. We, after all, are an
educational institution, and we want to convey new information
to people. I mentioned
That applies to the physical objects as well.
We were hoping to find big
things, drab things, unassuming things, impressive things andl
kind of have a mix
And I think we did a in the galleries.
But you'll have to go to the fairly decent job of that.
to that. We also museum to really know the answer
some surprises and elicit the, wanted to include
experience in our visitors. And I hope we have accomplished
that. We wanted a wide geographical
representation. You might imagine that a lot of
the stories are weighted
We made a conscious effort to include other stories from all
over the state. We
Chippewa Falls, Bayfield County, managed to cover Racine,
job in that respect. And and I think we did a pretty good
objects of significance. finally, we hope to find
important impact or Innan ongoing influence.d an
So that's kind of what we were
So this is the first section keeping in the back of our mind.
Stories like the of the original outline.
left one overall impression. One Case gasoline engine
supposed firsts are firsts if you apply enough qualifications
and equivocations. The
as many answers as it did questions, at least initially.
And maybe the basic question
what makes something a that we had to tangle with was,
I'll give you some different Wisconsin invention?
that question. Most of stories to sort of illustrate
this is. Stephen you probably know who
inventor of possibly the Babcock, who is the
invention: the Babcock quintessential Wisconsin
This was a cheap, reliable, quick method of measuring the
butterfat content of milk. It allowed the dairy industry to
detect watering and skimming. It allowed good farmers to be
paid appropriate to the quality of their milk and provide a firm
standard for the economic development of the dairy
industry. Babcock gave
free with the idea of sort of benefiting the whole industry
and community. What could be more Wisconsin?
But consider this: Babcock
He studied at Tufts in Boston, grew up in New York.
Polytechnic Institute, and Cornell, the Rochester
in Germany. He came to the University of Gottingen
was kind of pressured into Wisconsin in 1887 and
which got his name even though working on the Babcock test
published by one of the thecolleagues at the UWeen
experimental station a
So, really, how couplWisconsin is this?his.
You may notice I'm asking a lot of questions rather than
providing answers. You
probablguy. Les Paul,ze this
the Wizard of Waukesha. He
the solid body electric guitar, and he was responsible for the
invention of multi track
standard professional technique of sound recording for the last
50 years. It's no exaggeration to say that
Les Paul has profoundly shaped
But although he began his early sonic experiments as a kid in
Waukesha, he did his most influential work in California,
in Los Angeles, and then in New Jersey when he lived in
sort of the New York City area. So, was the Wizard of Waukesha
really Wisconsin? Anybody know who the guy in the
center is? This is Tom Blake.
In the year 2000, Surfing Magazine named Milwaukee native
Tom Blake the second most influential person in the
history of 20th century surfing.
swimmer who spent his first 17 He was an outstanding distance
surfing in California in 1921, years in Wisconsin and began
for the sport which led him eventto embark on a tide ofsion
experimentation that transformed
Among his other accomplishments, the sport of surfing.
surfboard, there's a patent for it, the waterproof camerae
housing, the first surfboard
He designed rescue paddle boards with a fin on the bottom.
of lives and wrote the first credited with saving thousands
surfing. He also full length book devoted to
the surfing lifestyle. He was a vegetarian, a fitness
enthusiast who worked just
a movie stuntman to live simply amidst beautiful tropical
landscapes and travel to surf ever more remote and challenging
shores. Blake retired from regular
surfing at age 55, eventually returned to northern Wisconsin.
He died there in 1994 and was buried in Washburn, overlooking
Chequamegon Bay. So like
and grew up in Wisconsin, did his influential work elsewhere.
If we claim Les Paul, why not Tom Blake?
It does seem rare that there's a
did ground-breaking perswork here in Wisconsin. and
This is Seymour Cray, posing
which he introduced in 1975. with the Cray-1 supercomputer
architect. And Cray was the supercomputer's
computers and other sort of applications, supercomputers are
essentially blazing fast
scientific calculations macand nothing else.sive
The Cray-1 and its successors have been crucial in weather
forecasting and climate simulations, petroleum
exploration, aircraft design, nuclear and molecular modeling.
Cray was born and raised in Chippewa Falls, and he liked the
area so much that he finagled his employer at the time,
Controlled Data Corporation in
lab for him in Chippewa Falls. Minneapolis, to build a research
his own company, Cray Research And in 1972 when he left to form
it in Chippewa Falls. And Coractually the successor toshed
that company still as a research
Falls. So there's facilialso another murkyppewa
question of who comes up with what part of a new invention and
who gets credit for it. And this led to kind of the
second grouping in the
What constitutes an invention? Is it priority?
Superior documentation? Commercial success?
Propaganda? Luck?
It could be any or
And this section of the exhibit was designed to explore how many
successful innovations really were the first of their kind.
Take, for example, the
knows was founded in Ripon, RWisconsin, on March 20, 1854.ne
Of course, it all depends on
There are a number of other places that claim the honor of
the birth of the
One is Exeter, New Hampshire, where on October 1853 they
proposed to establish a new party called the Republican
party. After the
Jackson, Michigan, hosted the first so-called convention of
the Republican party that had 10,000 attendees.
If you want to be more official,
National Committee was in 1856 the first Republican
and organize a national party, established in Pittsburgh to try
Philadelphia, they held their first presidential nominating
convention. So depending
founding, any of those on how you define
Ripon's claim is based on sort cities have a claim.
And in the words of Allen Bovay, of formal party membership.
of the meeting in Ripon, "We who is one of the organizers
held in the schoolhouse wenas Whigs, Free Soilersing
and Democrats. We came
and we were the first Republicans in the Union."
That's what the historical
That's right. This marker says, too.
is an answering machine. [LAUGHTER]n
The telephone answering machine was actually invented
by Valdemar Poulsen of Denmark
And Poulsen's device was who patented it in 1898.
but rarely used in the common in Europe by the 1920s
due to a legal quirk. The American telephone answering
machine was developed by Joseph Zimmerman of Milwaukee in 1949.
The reason this machine has precedence in the US is that
since about 1820, AT&T had owned
lines in the United States and almost all of the telephone
called foreign equipment, refuie. things they did notthey
manufacture, to be attached directly to its lines.
And this kind of technical or legal barrier kind of stymied
things until Zimmerman found
His electronic secretary, which is pictured on the right, had no
electrical attachments to AT&T's circuits at all.
Instead, a mechanical arm physically lifted the receiver
from the cradle, and a 78-RPM phonograph played a recorded
greeting and the caller's message was recorded
on a wire recorded. This
American version, which became was the first successful
barriers to foreign devices started crumbling in the 1950s.
Another very familiar story to
typewriter. But did manyyou know there were the
already more than a hundred previous patents for typing
machines issued when Christopher
in 1868? Did you also Sholesknow it was anotherved his
20 years before the typewriter
success? So why do achieved any sort of commercial
particular one? I think there's two reasons.
The first is that it was the
actually type words faster than you could write them, which was
kind of a landmark. And maybe more memorable is the
fact that this features the QWERTY keyboard which he
developed as kind of a technical
because the most frequently used way to keep keys from jamming
each other. So he kind letters tended to be next to
in a kind of arbitrary way, which has basically been
grandfathered into
At this point, I'll let Joe talk about the next couple of
sections, and we'll take it from there.
Kapler: Just do understand
Sholes' original typewriter. that that's not Christopher
pretty rarely ever exists. Again, the alpha artifact
Remington. After he And sold Remington they...
rights. >> So essentially an early
production model of kind of what
knew, of as the typewriter. I'll we now know, or in some cases
section called local culture. And you see the question there
that research on this subject matter kind of brings to mind.
Geography in distinct regional
I suppose that could be a book. cSo it's hard to definitively.
answer but in a word, yes.
You've probably seen his Another iconic guy.
You may have seen some photo around before.
Of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, of his work, too.
scholars, as an innovator of one and architectural historians and
architectural style, the of the first distinct American
Architectural historians would Prairie School style.
good case, that his growing up maybe claim, or certainly make
hills around Spring Green, in the prairie, rolling prairie
later work as an architect to Wcreate something that reallys
no one had seen much of really
world previous to that. How in do you tell the story ofhe
Frank Lloyd Wright
Wouldn't you really want in a museum gallery?
Go to Taliesin? Go to a wonderfully restored or
preserved Frank Lloyd Wright house?
Yes, that would probably be a great way to do it, but we tell
stories through artifacts and this is something that we have
in our collection, and turned out to be a really great
way here to tell the story
So this is a cardboard and to get the idea.
The design here was done by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1938 as
part of a Life magazine program where they picked four
significant American architects to design a home that could be
affordable for the average
could send in to get plans and American family, and people
like that. Frank Lloyd it was a participatory program
that 1938 Life magazine, Frank Wright, you look at
different than all the others, Lloyd Wright's design is very
hallmarks of the Prairie School as you see in this model here.
So you could buy this model via mail order, cardboard, cut it
out, take it home, assemble it, and that's kind of a neat story
but it doesn't end there at all.
this design into an Frank actual to be built.turned
And this is, has anyone ever
This is the Bernard Schwartz been to Two Rivers, Wisconsin?
two rivers in the town there. houAnd so what a great story.he
This was a model that was purchased by a Wisconsin person.
It was later, the design was
It happened to be in Wisconsin. So what a wonderful artifact
here to kind of tell the story
style architecture. It of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie
because it's displayed about works good for school kids
kind of down there at that level three or four feet high, and
Little things like that, if that's kind of how we can make a
connection to a visitor,
Snowmobile. That's one that's great.
That sounds about right. You that you have seen.
You may not know may never have heard that.
Carl Eliason, Sayner, Wisconsin. who this man is.
he called the motor toboggan. AAnd this is kind of, again,at
where local geography really
He had a slight physical ailment did influence an innovation.
difficult time navigating on the north woods deep snow,d a
north woods forest
Snowshoes did not work so well for him.
This is a photo from some time
that motor toboggan. At that after 1924 when he first created
people were slapping skis on time and prior to that,
and that could go down the road and the trails and all that, but
he needed something more nimble to get through the forest.
And this is essentially a toboggan with a motor, cobbled
together with some pieces,
There's an automobile I thradiator on there.or.
In all of the show, this is the only example where the alpha
artifact exists. This exists almost like this
today. It is in the Vilas County
Museum, Vilas County Historical Society Museum, and it's there
during the summer season and
Hardware and Lumber it'Company in Sayner.son
So you can see that alpha artifact, hardly changed since
1924. Still a great story, looks cool.
If you have gone by our front window display at the museum
recently, you'll see another
Eliason motor toboggan. And eit's big and massive, and itt
looks like it would be very scary to ride on today.
We have that out in our front window, and it's restored and
it's a great way to, we thought it was a great artifact to get
people to stop, look in,
There's some nice images behind it and gets some great reactions
from people who see that thing. And immediately you go, that's
something early and there's our Wisconsin innovations, so in a
quick way, via artifact, we're
thousands of people who walk pitching the exhibit to all the
Lastly, another local pastcultural innovation.day.
If you've ever enjoyed the
of a Door County fish boil. And these are some folks early
on in, is this '62? I want to say 1962.
The photograph is 1963. >> 1963.
And if you've been to a Door County fish boil,
of course we all know fish fry
certainly statewide heavy iin the state of Wisconsin,,
but the fish boil. So there's a lot of good history
behind that. Lake Michigan surrounding Door
County there, always celebrated the harvest of the lake.
Essentially, a white fish cook
Church groups started picking up at the end of the season.
to build community through food. on this type of thing as a way
the development of this innovation, and as they began in
larger and larger numbers following World War II,
traveling to the Door County
used these fish boil peninsula, these churches then
They were on to something there certainly, getting money from
folks visiting Door County. And they did this through the
fish boil, and, of course,
one of these, there's lots of drama in the process and flames
and some fire and lighting
But to really commercialize it when the oil is lit.
synonymous with Door County, and make it indelible and almost
that's Lawrence on the right Annette and Lawrence Wickman,
Grill, if anybody knows the Viking Grill, added a weekly
fish boil, maybe not necessarily
year-round weekly and toresults were great.but
Other restaurants followed suit,
and this event is known anreally around the countrydes
as the Door County fish boil. So those are a few things where
you see local culture and geography influencing the nature
of innovation in some fun creative manners, too.
I'm going to turn it back over
through some more of the to Dave who's going to go
Driscoll: Thanks, Joe. I'll mention a little bit later
about some of the collecting
One of the things we collected we did for this project.
Viking Grill. And the was cool thing about that isthe
they were made out of the central agitator compartment of
Speed Queen washing machines. [LAUGHTER]
Made in Ripon. They were
and they were cheap at the time. just the right size,
not doing that anymore because The current owner told me he's
for $150 from their yparts warehouse now.m
[LAUGHTER] But at the time,
they were just the ticket.
innovations that we developed was kind of long on things like
the first laminated steel padlock made by Master Lock in
Milwaukee. Or the polyethylene automobile
battery houses made by
Not exactly sort of steam engine or light bulb type of
inventions. So this kind of raised the
question: can small innovations have large impacts?
And we did find a number of examples of exactly that case.
These two guys are James
Folkert Belzer, on the right, who were medical researchers at
the UW working on ways to prolong the viability of organs
for transplantation. Over more than a decade they
developed and refined a preservation fluid that
quadrupled the viability
Introduced clinically in 1986, of organs for transplant.
different manufacturers and sold the fluid was licensed to
it's almost universally referred under different trade names, but
and it's still kind of the to these days as UW Solution,
field. The UW stanSolution didn't justthis
increase the success rate of
the entire organ transplant transystem in this country.rmed
Before the solution, when organs
hours, there were sort of two problems or there were
two issues with that
The first one was that the donor short viability.
very close together. If you and happened to need a newive
kidney and lived in the prairies
getting them were a lot less of North Dakota, your odds of
where there were a lot than if you lived in Chicago
Another serious issue, more people nearby.
was that any transplant surgery pahad to be emergency surgery.s,
You couldn't plan it or schedule
organ became available. And itat this time when UW fluidan
was introduced in the mid-'80s, there was kind of a theory of a
national organ procurement
in need were matched with donors system where the recipients most
but they couldn't actually make it happen because they couldn't
keep the organs viable for
And once UW Solution was a long enough period.
it basically made the current innational organ transplantand
procurement system possible.
development but has had Svery far reaching effects.
This fellow is a guy named
might be familiar from Chester Beach, whose name you
In the first decade of the Hamilton Beach appliances.
a high speed fractional 20thhorsepower motor.oped
These are small motors that you can run on AC or DC power, and
they had very high RPMs. It was kind of a handy thing to
have. Initially,
individually as household motors, and you could sort of
attach them to your sewing
or something like that. And machithen eventually peoplesher
realized that, geez, you can use
Here's a shot of the exhibit these for a lot of other things.
You could use them for drink case in the gallery.
massagers and so mixers and vacuum cleaners and
There were a number of on and so forth.
one, I think that was one of companies, Hamilton Beach being
Beach founded, all of them three different companies that
they kind of developed this electric appliance industryd
there that kind of burgeoned. And for probably 50-60 years,
until maybe the '60s or '70s, Racine, Wisconsin, was known as
the small appliance capital of the world.
So this kind of small motor actually blossomed into sort of
the economic base of one
A couple of times we've alluded to the collecting that we did
as part of this process.
acquiring objects that clearly Identifying, tracking down,
historically important ideas is, and vividly communicate
job of a curator. And to arguably, the most fundamental
most fun part of the job. So most of us, it's also the
I got to run down leads and talk for more than a year, Joe and
The leads didn't always pan out, to lots of interesting folks.
new material for the exhibit. bAnd we're still hoping that aof
few of the leads we've
into good acquisitions. One esof the organizations that wern
wanted to pursue was Growing
This is Will Allen, who founded Growing Power in 1995, to
address a food crisis in urban America.
Too many poor neighborhoods with
affordable food amidst diet related illnesses like diabetes,
and obesity kind of getting out of control.
And Growing Power's farms in
developed into a national and Minternational models fore
creating innovative,
In 2008 the MacArthur Foundation sustainable, urban food systems.
and in 2010 Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most
influential people. We
Growing Power for knew several reasons.ument
One is it's have very interesting sort of modern take
on the state's long agricultural history.
And secondly, it would build
collections. The folks our weak African American
extremely welcoming, and Allen at Growing Power were
eventuhis back. [LAUGHTER]rt off
And the pitch fork
[LAUGHTER] And a off his truck.
including a makeshift compost sifter that was
constructed out of an old electric clothes dryer which
kind of illustrates the kind
underlies a lot of Growing of do-it-yourself ethos that
And at this point I'll hand it Power's operations.
he did the leg work on. >> back to Joe for a project that
here are another great example Kapler: And these two pieces
Not everything we take in at a also of contemporary collecting.
has to be old. A museum, a historical museum,
It will be old some day. And lot of it isn't.
looking forward. What partwould be significantlly
down the road. And so these were used up until
a year ago, and fortunately Mr. Allen was generous enough to
donate these things that he actually used, wore and used in
the pursuit of his endeavor.
materials that bring These are real authentic
Here's another interesting that story home.
to include in this exhibition of Wisconsin story that we'd hope
guy here is Max G. Nohl, who Wisconsin innovations, and this
And that looks like something off the coast of California,
perhaps off the east coast, but that is off the lake shore
of Lake Michigan, Milwaukee and 37.
Set a deep water diving,
12that he set. >> 420.d
Excuse me, 420 feet.
And, of course, there's Yelots of publicity..
But you wouldn't think
Wisconsin for deep sea diving, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or
That's a great story, and then, again, we always thinking about.
artifacts and objects, that just looks cool as well.
And so we went on the hunt for
working with folks in Wisconsin Mand kind of Great Lakes diving
community and other diving historians.
Everybody is looking for Max
far as we know it is Nohl's diving equipment, and as
But you never know. Someday somebody will maybe
stumble across it in their
This guy also then, he did attic or something like that.
co-founded a company in Milwaukee called Diving a numberEquipments, but he
& Salvage Company.
That name is important. He DESCO for short.
about the same time foundhe's doing that.ight
So that company is still around,
pursuit of, again, anything related to this dive or what the
other endeavor that put DESCO on the map, and that was as a
wartime supplier to the United
helmet, kind of that classic States for the Mark V diving
Every little figure in a fish tank has one of those on.
They were the largest supplier. But we learned it really wasn't
a Wisconsin design originally.
changes or upgrades, and so it DESCO did not make any major
story. But then this is wheren
serendipity sometimes works for us and so we went over there, we
toured the place and met with the owner and employees and had
really nice conversations and they have lots of history on
their walls and in their
So we were looking for Max Nohl materials, we were looking for
maybe something to Mark V, and
the Air Hat? I'm sure they swe were a little bit about
embarrassed, but we did not know about the Air Hat.
This exhibition presents a great
something that actually has oworld class importance.t
So this is a diver wearing the
1967, and it quickly became the preferred helmet for hazardous
underwater environments where safety and mobility are crucial.
The watertight construction and the positive air pressure to
keep the nasty outside liquids
crucial. Say you're froworking in chemicalr is
storage tanks, nuclear
which is what you're probably cothinking, sewage treatments,
facility work. And that is a DESCO Air Hat in
operation, invented the then
in 1967. And there owner of the company Tom Fifield
Another innovative individual who just always had ideas
churning, and he learned in about this time in the mid, late
'60s of commercial divers down
helmets to do some in the Gulf modifying motorcycle
Motorcycle helmet with, I would imagine, duct tape was employed
and garden tubing. And, though resourceful, I think
he saw a great opportunity as well as a great new market.
And if you look to the image
items, this is a shot taken on thfrom the exhibition. two
This helmet here is one of the
from 1967. So it's four prototypes that they have
alpha artifact, which pris pretty neat.he
And then over here is essentially a 2011 helmet right
off the shop floor. So
where we have, you see the this was an nice example
in this case isn't that much. It evolution of the innovation, but
and the quality of it. We swere able to borrow both ofn
these items from DESCO. It was great to get the
prototype, but then this here we
to be able to get one. Of wcourse, the tsunami in Japang
and then the subsequent nuclear disaster at Fukushima put,
essentially, a worldwide
of DESCO Air Hats. And crunch on the availability
little shop in old Third World you wouldn't think this
materials that have genuine Mworldwide significance ande
importance and, fortunately, we were able to obtain one right
off the shop floor for
So Dave's going to talk now about some of the stories that
didn't make the gallery presentation.
Driscoll: Yeah, as I
a long list of possible topics mentioned earlier, we had
I'd just give you a bit of a to explore, and I thought
we didn't include. Top taste of some of the things
the Appleby twine knotter which was the essential mechanism that
tied a knot in string to bind sheaves of wheat in harvesting
machines. We decided
because the real object is only a couple inches long, and I
think we couldn't display that
there's a lobster withclaw in the exhibit. why
[LAUGHTER] The
was a breed of dog that was developed in the Fox River
Valley as a waterfowl hunting Doug.
It was recognized as a distinct breed in 1926, I believe.
And we didn't include that
continually refused to allow because the exhibition crew
me to window. [LAUGHTER] front
Go figure. Wisconsin
designate the state highway wsystem with numbers.o
And we did some checking and the
whether any of these early state DOT, no one has any idea
survived. So a good 191idea but no artifacts.gns
The lower left is a working metal micromotor which you can
see on the forehead of an ant.
the UW engineering professor These were developed in 1991 by
bother asking for one of those Henry Guckel, and I didn't even
and they gave them to us, we because even if they had them
people could see them. And couldn't display them so that
surviving example of a Wadham's oil gas station, which is
possibly the earliest example of
and the first ones of these apagoda type structures wereg,
built in the late teens.
we didn't do. But as we were making our final
selections, we also reexamined
discussed, the sort of once a Badger, always a Badger, first,
not first kind of categories, and essentially we scrapped it.
We eventually concluded that the
on a kind of Socratic method of asking thematic questions andd
provoking answers that cause
probably was a little too academic and would probably be
too complicated for the types of audiences we have that Joe
talked about at the beginning.
make our ideas We were always struggling to
And I think our first version of simpler and clearer.
meet that criteria. Rule the script just didn't, I think,
right labels at a sixth of grade reading level.to
And I don't think this is exactly dumbing down, the labels
we hope are still worthwhile and
accessible to more people. And engaging, but it does make them
is fundamentally about since the exhibition format
the more abstract organizing storytelling, we decided to drop
stories by broad themes: food, categories and just group the
technology, and a section we recreation, popular culture,
better kind of theme. And cathe picture, by the way, is a
the first purpose built garbage truck.
The refuse getter was introduced
in 1932. Exhibitions by the Leach Company of Oshkosh
Research is really only the first part, and to communicate
the ideas we want to, we need to
in an engaging and arrange the objects and stories
Doug Griffin, who is our informative way.
And I can't take any credit exat all for the look of thet.
displays. Although, I am responsible for
the mediocre gallery
Visual presentation is a kind of complicated craft, and it
includes all the topics you see on the screen.
And I certainly can't speak with
but I'll try to convey some of the authority that Doug could,
Doug chose to meet them. The the challenges involved and how
issue for exhibits is labels. When we simplified the outline,
we didn't have the same kind of organizing hierarchy that we
intended. So the
carry more weight really. And this is actually a pretty
complex document. It's
version that Doug worked out, which is why it's kind ofy
boilerplate Latin in the middle.
different features that are supposed to accomplish different
things. We have a,
get the mouse to work, there we go, we have sort of a title.
Who are we talking about? It's the equivalent of the,
orients your eye and kind of
We then included on each label a tells you where you're starting.
that is supposed to provoke you and draw you into the topic and
make you wonder what's going on here and read the label to find
out. We also thought
to have the equivalent of sort it was important
side. Complete names of bullet points on the left
the years of the invention. In this case, Les Paul did
a bunch of interesting work over a number of decades.
Where the invention occurred, which happens here.
That's important in the sort of geographical issues that Joe
talked about earlier. And then finally we wanted to
kind of do a really quick summary of what the impact was.
In this case, we kind of went out on a limb and didn't say the
solid body electronic guitar. We said modern popular music is
really what Les Paul invented.
there's kind of a take And finally, along the bottom,
If you remember nothing else but home message tag line.
you'll have learned something from the exhibit.,
We also tried, wherever possible, to include a
photograph of the inventor. In
cultural things like the Brandy Old Fashioned that don't have a
single inventor, but we wanted
creativity in this exhibit. to kiAnd I think in sort ofdual
academic circles, the idea of a lone genius
has been kind of discredited. In fact, there are some folks
who believe that with a certain set of precedence, cultural
demands and available resources,
essentially, inevitable, and that most innovations are,
will invent it. We chose if it's not person A, person B
particular issue. So not to address that
complicated things that we hope the labels can accomplish.
Why is it in Latin? >>
design technique that just fills That's a kind of graphic
going to be here, we don't have utime to actually write it yet,s
but here's what it's
So that wasn't actually gused in the final?
No, that was a prototype. Here's a part of the exhibition
that I'm calling the Harvestore deck for the large Harvestore
silo sheet that's in the far corner.
And I picked this slide to
One is the diversity of ilartifacts that I mentioneds.
earlier. We've got
the Harvestore sheet. Hanging above, we've got a 1903
Cadillac automobile frame made by AO Smith Company in
Milwaukee. That sort
middle is a kidney profusion of whitish box in the
fluid to preserve kidneys for transplant, and the Air Hat is
there. So we've got sort of a diversity
of things arranged, and also note the use of color.
We use different colors to
This is sort of the dblue invention section.s.
This is also the red
And that includes a Tom Blake paddle board from the 1940s
which we really hoped we could find.
We were on the verge of dropping
the artifacts. These this because we couldn't find
pretty collectible, and they boards are pretty rare and
So we couldn't afford to buy cost about $15,000 each.
And then kind of at the last one even if one turned up.
basement of the Washburn Area Historical Museum they had one
of these. I guess they're working on their
own Tom Blake exhibit.
barn in North Dakota Somehow they found this in a
But they were gracious enough to or something.
put it on display. And share it with us, and we sort of
mentioned that technology is the earlier slide, I
be aware of. Notice the sometsort of wall paper onave to
the back. That's all
graphic material. It's one kind of adhesive
it's got a Popular Mechanics got the patent drawings,
photograph from National illustration, it's got a
on the self-adhesive stuff Geographic all kind of printed
And that's something that Doug that just goes up on the wall.
affordable, bang for figured out is a fairly cheap,
And I also use the term tsort of visual pop..
Just make things
I included this slide because on interesting and engaging.
of that case, it includes the bottpatent drawings. bottom
The case includes something called Harken blocks which is a
fabulous piece of tackle
And I won't go into the details of it, but you'll see they're
pretty small sort of artifacts. The cases we had in them had
gray Formica around the bottom, and I think that was a way to
lose the artifact if it was surrounded by all this neutral
stuff. And Doug figured out a way to
blow up the patent drawings and apply them to the cases to just
make the cases more integrated
And also, we had a lot of support from Harken, Inc.
of Pewaukee, which built an interactive for visitors to use.
There are different pulleys you can pull on there using Harken
blocks to get across the concept
to do. So that was of more pulleys equals less work
what a nautical block is. It was actually a really
complicated thing to do in a
I had. It was a lot label andeasier to justhe space
shove that off to here, pull on these things, you'll figure it
out. We're historians.
We generally look backward, not forward.
The goal of the exhibition was
between place and creativity to explore the relationship
question: where does which leads to a kind of crucial
And its practical corollary: how innovation come from?
So this is the part of the can we encourage more of it?
some tentative lessons, presehistorical lessons. offer
And the lessons are going to
resources, community, surrounand education.topics:
All of them, I think, are crucial in fostering innovation.
Resources can come
Increase Lapham, on the left, is often called the father of
the Weather Bureau. In
innovation, it was not this case, it wasn't his
What he added to the Weather the initial concept.
work. The phenomenon Bureau was a way of making it
from west to east was well-known of weather moving
and the idea of wiring weather to meteorologists by about 1835,
occurred shortly after the observations from west to east
So the idea of sort of observing invention of the telegraph.
people in the east what weathwas coming was prettylling
well established by 1850. But nobody could figure out who
would organize and pay for that until Increase Lapham managed
that. The chart on
deals with that phenomenon. That's a chart that he drew
based on observations that he took simultaneously in Milwaukee
and a colleague in Dubuque. And it shows the barometric
readings separated by about eight hours.
And they follow a very close curve.
So he's sort of using this chart
of this technique. Lapham's to deopportunity came inbility
1869 when a very severe storm season on the Great Lakes caused
an usually high loss of life and
Lapham assembled copious property, shipwrecks and so on.
losses and, again, proposed that documentation about all the
of storm warnings. And the government operate a system
getting it to the right guy. The his crucial decision was
is a Wisconsin Congressman named guy on the lower right there
army general in the Civil War. Halbert Paine, who was a former
Signal Corps maintained its own nationwide telegraph system.
So once Paine got the information from Lapham, he
drafted a resolution directing
meteorological readings at the army to take regular
country and then gather the mresults and telegraph them tohe
Washington. This
approved. The infrastructure was
essentially in place already, and in less than a year what
eventual became the Weather Bureau was up and running with
Lapham the chief of the Great Lakes Bureau in Chicago.
These days, kind of resources I think we mostly consider venture
capital, that's what you need.
the resources are, you need But to have them in place.what
Another crucial question is how important is the presence of a
like-minded community? And
essential, short answer. One I think it's absolutely
people think of when they think of Wisconsin history is the
progressive era, the progressive
heap of innovative social molegislation starting about a a
hundred years ago. The ideas
Wisconsin include the direct that were pioneered in
regulation of utilities, primary election, government
tax, old age system which is the workers' compensation, an income
system, and precunemployment insurance.urity
And this kind of package of legislation couldn't have
happened without many like-minded people all working
on new approaches and persuading
the public to accept them. I their legislative colleagues and
slow down on who these folks guess for time, I'll sort of
progressives. Unfortunately, are, but they're all Wisconsin
idea but would this is a crucial
There's no artifacts. We kind of dropped it.
Wisconsin also has a great
innovation, which is way too history of environmental
really wanted to engage that extensive to go into here, but I
You may or may not know that in the exhibit somehow.
Arboretum is it the oldest Curtis Prairie at the UW
It was the work of many hands. restored prairie in the world.
even kind of decide what It took at least 10 years to
The project has been revised, elaborated, improved ever since.
Here are some of the people crucial in its development.
Aldo Leopold is the kind of guy in the white suit in the lower
left who had the idea that
laboratory for restoring the Arboretum ought to be a
plant zoo. Upper left landscais John Curtis, aind of a
botany professor who helped develop the burning techniques
in the 1940s who was so crucial in overseeing the prairie that
they eventually named it after him.
On the lower right is Norman
professor who undertook the first prairie sod transplanting
in 1935 that kind of helped establish the prairie.
And the guy in the snow is Ted
was hired in 1936, and he really Sperry, a prairie ecologist who
He supervised the Civilian kind of made the thing happen.
restored the prairies. So Conit was the work of manyhat
hands, and it's continued well after these folks
were not around anymore. There
dealing with this in were two big problems with
One is the story isn't a museum context.
It's kind of a quite punchy enough.
It's diffuse. It carries complicated story.
and there aren't many artifacts. on over many decades,
this is kind of daunting The most interesting thing about
changing perspectives of things and not the sort of standard
hardware which is shovels and tape measures and stuff.
What we wound up doing is a much
on it. And we were tighter, narrower kind of take
specific ecological restoration technique that was developed at
the Arboretum which is the use
and discourage invasive species. of fire to promote native plants
1980s, 1990s tools We managed to acquire some
These are not the alpha artifacts, but they're
functionally identical. In
has been in production some cases, the same design
I think this made a pretty good display in the museum, but
perhaps my major disappointment with the whole exhibition is
that we couldn't really deal
in a more comprehensive way. with this whole communities idea
that the UW has acted as the Most of you are probably aware
hundred years. These innovation engine for at least a
things, topics that are dealt with in the exhibit that have a
Wisconsin origin. And we
limit the quantity really had to consciously
We could have done the whole that we included.
But there are a couple of others exhibit on UW materials.
quickly here. One of that I want to go through fairly
productive multigenerational them is the hugely
studies. The field was research enterprise of vitamin
UW by Elmer McCollum in the upper left, who identified
vitamin A in 1913 in butterfat
couple years later identified and cvitamin B in whey.hen a
One of his students was Harry Steenbock, who is in the lower
left, who discovered that ultraviolet radiation boosted
the vitamin D content of certain foods.
This discovery effectively
disease, and his vitamin D eliminated rickets as a common
the Wisconsin Alumni Research pFoundation which was anotherf
idea that was first developed in Wisconsin.
Conrad Elvehjem, in the upper right, is best known for
discovering niacin, or vitamin
disease called pellagra. He's Bknown for his philanthropicin
activities throughout the city. And this tradition continues
down to today. And the
is Hector DeLuca, who studied under Steenbock, continued to
work on vitamin D, and his
successful of vitamin D drugs to treat conditions from kidney
failure to psoriasis. And finally, probably the best
known example of a research community at the UW
is the stem cell research.
scope of this talk. And the Anotidea of a community ofthe
investigators cross-pollinating each other to produce new
innovations is the founding concept behind the Institutes of
Discovery built right across the street.
We like to think of the field emanating from James Thomson,
on the upper left, who first
cells in 1998. And we do propagated human embryonic stem
his lab and the computer have the freezer from
which I managed to snag before controlled cryogenic freezers,
they years ago. [LAUGHTER]ber of
A couple more weeks and we would have lost it.
But, of course, there's other folks working here at the UW
on stem cells like --, who's
stem cells to get the same working on reprogramming adult
embryonic stem cells. And I think it's important tos
remember that these guys have built and are continuing to
build on a long tradition of
includes the work of Oliver Smithies, who developed some of
the basic gene splicing techniques now used the world
over. And that's a
the upper right receiving a Nobel Prize for his work at
Wisconsin. And we,
collecting for this, discovered a liquid nitrogen tank that he
used to keep frozen mouse embryos at his labs here in
Wisconsin in the 1980s. So
Nobel Prize winning work. So I think that's more thans
enough time, but I would be remiss to not mention the
organizations that provided financial support to the
exhibition. The lead
Madison Community Foundation, and we had additional money
from the Evjue Foundation, the
the Sentry Equipment Corporation American Family Insurance and
Promega Corporation and Koski, and yet other support from the
and the Madison Gas & WisconElectric Foundation. Bank,
I want to leave you with a final
of Nekoosa, Wisconsin. We imaclaim that Wisconsin iswis
responsible for the birth of
Visit the museum modern professional wrestling.
[LAUGHTER] Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]